About

… this blog

This is a blog about nanoscale analysis - mainly nearfield infrared spectroscopy using AFM-IR (or PTIR, or some might say PIFM) and s-SNOM.

… the author

I got into nearfield infrared spectroscopy in 2013, when my thesis supervisor gave me the chance to visit the labs of Andrea Centrone at NIST and Mikhail Belkin at UT Austin. My thesis was spent building an AFM-IR system at TU Wien, including some custom electronics development. After my thesis I was a post doc in Andrea Centrone’s lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology getting a deeper insight into AFM-IR.

My current place of work is the Nearfield Lab at the Institute of Chemical Technologies and Analytics at TU Wien.

… the lab

The TU Wien nearfield lab is part of Bernhard Lendl’s working group at TU Wien at the institute of Chemical Technologies and Analytics. We currently sport quite a decent set of instruments - a BRUKER nanoIR 1 and nanoIR 3s equipped with a Daylight Solutions MIRcat EC-QCL for CW and pulsed operation. Additionally, the lab has access to a TERS ready WITec 300RSA+ Raman/AFM system.